One matter that has exercised us - and David Hewson - in the last few weeks has been about nomenclature: do we call ourselves crime novelists or thriller writers?  David happened to be at Bouchercon at the time I opened the debate on Crime Beat but kindly took a few minutes off from a dangerous panel discussion where he thought he might be lynched to post a comment in response.  In part he wrote, 'In the US "thriller" is certainly winning over "crime" because it's a broader term that can encompass a lot of writing styles, and it appeals to a very general readership. That's not to say people shouldn't write traditional crime genre. But I do feel that in practical terms a lot of the books currently tagged as crime really don't fit the bill.  And there's certainly a negative feeling among readers about the term.'

It's this 'negative feeling' that's at the base of things here.  Given the real crime situation in SA, some writers, publishers, and booksellers are keen to 'rebrand' the genre as thrillers.  How bad is the real crime situation?  Well, I can name murdered colleagues, close friends and colleagues who have been raped, some who have been robbed at gunpoint, some who've had their houses burgled, some who've been mugged, in fact, I would be hard pressed to name someone close who had not been a victim of crime.  Which makes the situation fairly serious.  I think of true crime in South Africa as the war we never fought.

The other issue behind the debate concerns the poor sales of local crime fiction.  Here the prevailing wisdom is that book buyers steer away from SA crime fiction for obvious reasons.  In the words of one bookseller, 'From a sample of one, my husband, who reads a lot in this genre, reads for escapism, he simply doesn't want to read about South African crime - it is too close to the bone.  I suspect that there are many similar to him.'

I'll go with that to a point.  More particularly I think we're battling a perception that if it's local it's not much good.  As Ann Donald, the owner of one of my favourite bookshops, Kalk Bay Books, put it, 'Sadly, customers are influenced by the fact that a crime novel is local.  Until persuaded otherwise, they assume it's inferior.'

An unhelpful tendency among booksellers in this regard is what I call the South African ghetto.  We're consigned to special shelves so that if, for example, someone wanders into the bookshop looking for a crime novel, they search through the shelves of imported novels, never thinking to look on the shelves of SA novels.

This is a topic that also gets to Deon Meyer, who in the last ten years has gathered a well-deserved international reputation.

'Everywhere else in the world,' he says, 'I get to compete shoulder to shoulder with international authors.  But in SA bookshops, we are regulated to "African" or "local" fiction, as if these are accepted (but slightly sub-par) categories. Why are there no shelves for "Australian fiction", or "US fiction", etc? The booksellers will deny that they see us as inferior, but that is the message they are sending to the book-buying public.  If the trade is looking for a "negative tag", that's where they should start.'

The debate is far from over and probably 'thriller' will win out in the end somewhat to my disappointment as I have to admit that the term crime novelist has something really cool about it.  If it came down to the wire I'd actually go for the German word 'krimi' which has a certain cache, don't you think?

Before I go off for my two and a half hour break between columns, I'll end with some fanfare as October was a good month for SA krimis.  Deon Meyer saw the release of his Blood Safari and his new Afrikaans novel 13 Uur, Chanette Paul published her latest Fortuin, and Cape Town writer Tracy Gilpin appeared under the Black Star imprint with her Double Cross.  

The way I look at it the more the merrier and maybe sooner rather than later we'll break through the reluctance of our compatriots to read us.

Till next time from a windy Cape Town.  Oh, before I go, you know that Ted Hughes poem 'Wind' which begins: 'This house has been far out at sea all night', well, that's what if feels like in my study right now.

ITW International Committee Chair for South Africa, Mike Nicol, is a journalist and writer and now a hard-core crime fiction addict. He's published two crime novels - Payback and Out to Score (a co-authorship), and is a founder of the blog Crime Beat.  He lives on Cape Town?s peninsula, up a mountain, in the teeth of the wind.